


Reindeer in the (Library) Closet

by Rainfallen



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Claudia Stilinski, Alive Hale Family, Alive Vernon Boyd & Erica Reyes, Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Christmas, Christmas Sweaters, Everybody Lives, Librarian Derek, Librarian Derek Hale, M/M, POV Derek, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 20:18:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2745647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainfallen/pseuds/Rainfallen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek just wanted to put the spare network cables away and escape from Erica, not get accosted in the storage closet by a boy wearing the most atrocious Christmas sweater he's ever seen.  On second thought, though, the accosting maybe wasn't such a bad idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reindeer in the (Library) Closet

   
Derek marched toward the storage closet with three boxes of outdated networking implements piled high in his arms like some kind of shield against the onslaught of words. As a shield, the boxes were woefully inefficient; Erica's voice was still clear in his ear though she was halfway across the floor. She sat, perched like some kind of misguided 1980s librarian pinup, on the edge of the circulation desk, and gleefully directed him throughout the morning as though filling in for Harley made her queen of the world and he her mere underling, not the county-wide head of Information Services who was technically her superior in every way that mattered.

"Don't forget the check the public workstation outside microfilms and media," she was saying. "It's been on the fritz and smelling like melted plastic since yesterday morning."

"I did hear you the first time," he called over his shoulder, louder than absolutely necessary because he, at least, had some sense of how to operate like a human being. Erica was decent at making a passing show of normal, even though she was without a doubt the biggest pain in the ass of his mother's latest crop of betas. Boyd was his favorite of the three who had been with them for almost four years now: steady, smart, and _quiet_ , without any of Isaac's vacillations between reticence and arrogance or Erica's frankly worrisome power issues. Unfortunately, he'd lost Boyd to BHHS's history department and Isaac to Deaton's clinic, and it was Erica of the lot of them who'd followed him to library science after deciding that medical school was not in her future after all. Maybe he could convince her to get a content Master's in biology or something and pawn her off on Aunt Joan at the medical library down in Sacramento.

Not likely.

Derek sighed, deeply put-upon. "Go turn it off and then back on again, would you?" he hollered, keeping the smirk from his face and voice as best he could. He'd checked it yesterday; tinsel in the vent, likely the handiwork of someone's particularly enterprising child.

He shouldered his way into the storage closet with the sound of Erica's loud grumbles and the click of her heels in his ears, and then balanced the boxes precariously in one hand as he flicked on the light switch with the other. Derek let the door fall shut behind him as he moved to shelve the equipment somewhere toward the back of the closet. He was comfortable in the library, acclimated to the scents of its books and the heartbeats of its patrons, tuned in to the creaks and cracks of its walls and the very flow of air through its old vents. He had been here for almost five years, settling back into his hometown with an ease he'd never imagined possible as a teenager, when he'd been wild-eyed and wolf hearted, filled with wanderlust and shame and broken ideals. Perhaps this new feeling of _settledness_ was the reason his senses were running at a tick lower than vigilant, because he only just heard the sound of a sharp intake of breath far too close to his ear as he sat the boxes on the shelf. There was a flash of movement around the side shelf, and he turned just in time to see two spindly hands in his face before he was tackled back against the door.

Derek was so startled he let himself be crowded back against the solid wood of the door, a large warm hand pressed over his mouth.

His assailant was familiar to him by scent and sight, a tall, gangly thing with long clumsy limbs, big Bambi eyes, and an impertinent everything. _Stiles,_ his brain supplied, creaking slowly back into motion after being startled to stillness for the briefest moment. Stiles, the sheriff and Claudia's kid. Stiles, the brat from Cora's year who sprung up like a weed in high school and made lewd comments in Derek's general direction every time Derek dropped his sister off for lacrosse practice. He was in college somewhere now— _somewhere_ being University of Chicago, but Derek had absolutely no valid reason to know that—but he'd wandered around the Beacon County Library every week or so over the last two summers and several times over this Christmas break, checking out a dozen books at a time, touching _everything_ , and being a general menace, vexing Derek to no end for reasons he preferred to avoid addressing. And now he was touching _Derek,_ one large hand still covering his mouth, fingers wiggling restlessly against the three-days' stubble on Derek's cheek, and the other pressed firmly against his chest, squeezed into the narrow space between their bodies. A traitorous part of Derek's brain was insisting that this was how some infamous nerd porno began, but he squashed the thought almost as soon as it arose and moved to bat the kid's hands away with an irritated grunt.

"Listen, no, just listen," Stiles whispered. "My crazy ex is right around the corner in non-fiction, and I can't get to the door without passing him. Can you just... I need you to... ugh, okay, listen, I'm going to move my hand, so please don't scream."

He pulled his hand away slowly and Derek charitably didn't bite it. Instead, he leveled his most unimpressed look at the kid and drug the back of his own hand across his mouth in a show of wiping it clean.

"Oh yeah, you're terrifying," Derek said, perhaps a beat too late, giving Stiles a once over such as he could in the close quarters. Stiles moved his hands in a flurry with an accompaniment of furious shushing sounds. "Yeah, I'll try to contain my screams," Derek added dryly, dropping his voice to a more acceptable pitch. God, he hoped Erica wasn't paying attention. She'd never let him hear the end of this. He tilted his head and listened for half a second; he didn't hear her heartbeat at all, and her voice was so faint that she must be upstairs. Good. She wouldn't hear them now unless she really tried.

Stiles' expression had morphed from worried to offended and he lifted his chin and thrust his shoulders back in an amusing attempt at posturing. "I will have you know I am a very scary in the right light," he whispered aggressively, and Derek thought he half believed it. A shame.

"A very scary man who is hiding from his ex-boyfriend in the closet of a library," Derek said, drawing the words out as long as possible to emphasize their absurdity.

Stiles gave him a dark look, and Derek frowned, an uncertain sort of guilt and suspicion bubbling up in his chest. "Why are you hiding from him?" he asked. "Is he...?" For the sake of caution, he listened carefully for a moment and honed in on the single heartbeat in non-fiction, just through the shared wall to his left. Derek knew all about crazy exes, after all.

Stiles' eyes widened and he shook his head. "No, Damon isn't violent or whatever. My dad would have his ass. He's just..." Stiles blew out a frustrated breath. "He cheated, right? And it was whatever, I was at school for four months, I get it, I guess, but. It wasn't just the once. And now every time I see him he asks if we can give it another try and he lost me about two tries ago and I'm really not up for that today."

Stiles took the two short steps backward that placed him about as far from Derek as he could get in the tiny space between the shelves. He looked closely wound, tension and tightness evident in his posture, his shoulders, at the edge of his mouth, and Derek suddenly wanted to make it loosen.

Derek gathered his thoughts a moment and took a breath, intending to offer some placating reassurance of Stiles' self-worth and judgment, but what came out of his mouth was, "What are you _wearing_?"

Stiles glanced down at himself and then looked back up at Derek, defiant. "You got a problem with reindeer, buddy?"

Derek held in a snort with some difficulty. "I love reindeer," he said loftily. "That? That is not a reindeer," he declared, and lifted a hand unthinking to poke at the knobby gnarled brown thing on the front of Stiles' otherwise garishly striped green and red sweater.

Stiles tucked his hands over the reindeer protectively, twin spots of pink darkening the lower portion of his cheeks. "You're one to talk, with stupid candy canes on your suspenders," Stiles snapped. "Who even _wears_ suspenders anyway, you're so—" he huffed, the flush spreading across his jaw as he gestured up and down the lines of Derek's torso, and wasn't _that_ interesting?

"Whatever, I'll be sure to tell my mom what you think of her handiwork," Stiles finished mutinously, and _shit_. As little as Derek knew Stiles, he was well aware that Claudia knew his mother, that they _talked_ , and if word got back to his mother that he'd made some snide comment... well, he could imagine the ear-pinching now. That would not do.

"This is what we've become? 'I'll tell my mom on you'? How old are you again?" Derek snorted and settled back against the door. He crossed his arms for good measure and let his smirk go full-force.

Stiles' rapid blinks almost synched with the brief escalation of his heartbeat, and Derek felt his smirk grow smug.

"I—what?" Stiles asked, and Derek was certain he wasn't imagining the slight breathlessness there. He certainly wasn't imagining the heightened note of interest in his scent.

_So worth it._

"I said," Derek lied blithely once he was confident that Stiles' train of thought is well and truly derailed, "what do you plan to do about erstwhile lover boy out there?"

"Erstwh— oh my god," Stiles said, seeming to forget his whispering rule momentarily.

Derek dropped the smirk, exasperated, and let himself be drawn off topic. "I work in a library and you think I don't read?"

Stiles rolled his eyes dramatically. "Reading and actually using the words you read are two different things," he said.

"Not so much. There are dozens of studies that link vocabulary size to reading comprehension and reading volume. Ergo the adult literacy program? Book drives? Story hour for kids? I know you've been around often enough to know about some of our programs."

Stiles waved a hand. "Yeah, I get that. But I thought you did tech stuff for the library system, not bookish stuff?"

"I put the 'I' in 'MLIS,'" Derek allowed, "But it's not like I—"

Stiles shook his head, eyes wide. "You put the 'I' in—oh my god, you are the biggest dork I have ever heard of. How do you even—" his hands shot up defensively as Derek tried to thump him "—okay, oww, shutting up!"

"My undergrad was computer science," Derek said after taking a moment to glare balefully. "Most of the technical classes in grad school were... elementary." He shrugged. "But I have the background to make up for it, so I can handle just about any networking or hardware issue we have. Digitization is what I really enjoy, but I can strong-arm my way through a catalogue entry if I need to, so I'm flexible."

Stiles quirked a single brow as he gave Derek a very obvious and very slow once-over. "Interesting," he said thoughtfully. "Usually the beefy ones are a little stiff."

"A little—" Derek began indignantly, but Stiles was suddenly back in his space, pawing him away from the door and pressing his ear up against it. This close it was hard to miss the embarrassed-tinged amusement in his scent, and it made something stupidly fond swell briefly in Derek's chest.

"Hey, do you think he's gone?" Stiles asked. His breathing was loud in the closed space. "Damon, I mean. My ex," he clarified after a moment's pause.

"I don't—" Derek began, and paused to listen. He wasn't gone. He'd been talking to Erica over by the stairs for the past 30 seconds or so, but Derek hadn't been paying attention so he didn't have the faintest idea what they'd been saying.

"I think it's clear," Stiles said, just as the voices moved closer.

"No, no, no!" Derek hissed. He made a grab for Stiles' arm, but Stiles already had the door open and his momentum didn't stop when Derek's hand closed around his arm. And then they were tumbling out of the closet, feet just tangled enough to stagger them, Stiles clutching wildly at Derek's shoulders for balance... just as Erica turned the corner, Damon at her elbow. (Derek immediately didn't like him. He was too hollow, too sharp around the edges, too much a carnivorous scavenger for Derek to feel anything for him but contempt.)

Two pairs of eyebrows shot up as Derek straightened and settled Stiles firmly on his own two feet. Derek turned to face them, shielding half of Stiles from view with his bulk. He held one hand warily behind him to keep Stiles in place, and perhaps Stiles misunderstood or perhaps he didn't, but he tangled his long fingers with Derek's and hovered just behind his shoulder, heart beating rapidly. Damon's mouth hung open a little as he looked between Stiles and Derek with something caught between jealousy and disbelief souring his scent. _Good_ , Derek thought uncharitably. 

" _Well,_ " Erica said, standing dangerously still. "Well, well, well."

Derek's expression dared her to press him, knowing already that he wouldn't hear the end of this. All that was left was to facing his certain doom head on, chin held high and shoulders squared defiantly.

Erica began to smile slowly, teeth like a shark. She was going to tell his mother, who would tell Laura—fuck, maybe even Peter—and then half his family would be hounding him about the cute boy who just might turn Cora into the last single Hale of his generation. _Fuck._ "Is this who you were looking for?" Erica asked Damon without ever taking her eyes from the two of them, honed in on the closeness and the clutch of hands not quite hidden behind Derek's back.

"Uh," Stiles began, and his eyes settled on Derek, panicked.

"I don't think so," Derek said as pleasantly as he could manage, fervently regretting everything about what he was about to do. He untangled their fingers and nudged Stiles forward, slid a hand possessively from Stiles' shoulder to his waist, tucked a finger inside a belt loop, and tugged until he was flush against Derek's side, a long lean line of vibrating energy and eager uncertainty. Erica looked like someone had just handed her a million dollars, and no glare in the world was going to rein her in this time. Time to salvage what dignity remained and get the fuck out.

"Excuse us," Derek said to Erica and a still-gaping Damon. He offered a toothy smile of his own that was anything but friendly, making a point to straighten his collar with his free hand as they shuffled past. Thankfully, Stiles possessed slightly more sense than Derek had first suspected, and he followed Derek's lead without a peep to the others. Derek lifted his chin and just kept walking until he reached his office. He hustled Stiles inside and slammed the door, the string of bells on the wreath jingling ominously.

He pointedly tuned Erica out and sighed at Stiles, who was hovering uncertainly in front of the closed door, looking at Derek like he'd never seen him before. "Hush," Derek said preemptively, stepping into his space.

"Oh my god," Stiles breathed faintly, looking back and forth between Derek's eyes and lips like there was simply no choosing between them. He made no move to pull away when Derek planted his hands on the door to either side of Stiles' head, hemming him in loosely in a gentler, reversed approximation of their earlier position in the closet, but just let his head fall back against the door and watched Derek almost lazily.

"Here's what we're going to do," Derek told him, now certain he was reading the signals right. "We're going to stay right here for another half hour, during which time your ex-boyfriend will have ample time to escort himself from the building. When you leave this office, you will look so debauched that even if he's stupid enough to stick around he will have no illusions of your interest or availability. Sound good?"

"Debauched," Stiles repeated, crinkles appearing around the edges of his eyes.

"Still taking issue with my vocabulary?"

"No, no, debauched is good," Stiles told him quickly. "I think that's going to be a good look for me. Any ideas about how to get me there because let me tell you I have a few thoughts I've been entertaining for about—"

A little stubble burn was good for a debauched look, right? Derek was sure it was, and Stiles seemed to agree, chasing after Derek's lips every time he pulled away even a little, running his hands and mouth across Derek's jaw in a way that made something primal in him swell with satisfied delight.

It didn't take half an hour for Stiles to work Derek's candy cane suspenders completely off his shoulders and his hands under Derek's shirt, despite Derek's protestations that _Stiles_ was the one who was supposed to look debauched. Stiles' poor reindeer sweater was flung abandoned across a filing cabinet or the desk or something—Derek wasn't terribly concerned with the semantics of it—and he had almost conquered the buttons of Derek's shirt when an insistent knock rattled the door at Stiles' back, setting the wreath ajingle.

"Go away," Derek ordered, his voice muffled in the juncture of Stiles' neck and shoulder.

"Derek Hale, if you have sex in this building so help me god," Erica hissed threateningly through the door.

Stiles laughed, a full-bodied thing that shook the door and made the bells jingle softly again on the other side. Derek felt it with the full length of his body from the way they were pressed together, their shared warmth staving off the chill in a way his double-paned windows never managed.

"Go away," Derek said again, smiling so wide he was sure Stiles could feel it. He wouldn't torture her that way—not today, anyway—but she didn't need to know that just yet. She could make all the muttered threats she liked—and she did, many and colorful as she stomped away—but he would deal with them later. He was happy where he was. 

"Is she going to be a problem?" Stiles asked, amused. His fingers had abandoned the now unbuttoned button-down and were doing something delightful in Derek's hair.

"Probably," Derek said. 

"She's going to tell your mother, isn't she?"

Derek sighed. "Definitely," he said. 

Stiles hummed quietly. "You know what this means," he said conversationally, as though they weren't half-dressed in Derek's place of employment.

"Mmm, what's that?"

" _She's_ going to tell _my_ mother. And then she's going to make you a reindeer sweater of your own. She's very serious about couples' holiday coordination."

Derek didn't have time to examine the flip in his stomach at the casual declaration, because from halfway across the building at circulation, he could hear Erica laugh so hard she tumbled off the edge of the desk. 

**Author's Note:**

> I like to imagine that a largely tragedy-free Derek Hale would hide out in a closet and make fun of peoples' Christmas sweaters and pretend to have made out with a cute boy and then actually make out with cute boy and get stinky pheromones all over the library and generally annoy Erica's sensitive wolfie nose. This is what I like to imagine. 
> 
>  
> 
> [12 Days of Sterek!](http://12daysofsterek.tumblr.com/)  
> [My tumblr!](http://sergendry.tumblr.com)  
> Happy holidays! :)


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